Principal Software Engineer – Data Engineer

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. 

As a Principal Software Engineer for Data, the person will lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and high-performance data pipelines across that involve healthcare clinical data, using modern big data and cloud technologies (Azure, Databricks, and Spark), ensuring alignment with UnitedHealth Group’s data governance standards. This role requires a hands-on leader who can write and review code, mentor teams, and collaborate across business and technical stakeholders to drive data strategy and innovation. The person needs to be ready to take up AI and AIOps as part of their work and support the data science teams with ideas and reviews their work.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design and lead the implementation of robust, scalable, and secure data architectures for clinical and healthcare data for batch and real time pipelines
  
• Architect end-to-end data pipelines using big data and cloud-native technologies (e.g., Spark, Databricks, Azure Data Factory)
  
• Ensure data solutions meet performance, scalability, and compliance requirements, including HIPAA and internal governance policies
  
• Build and optimize data ingestion, transformation, and storage pipelines for structured and unstructured clinical data. Guide teams that are doing it and ensure support for incremental data processing
  
• Ensure data quality, lineage is embedded in all solutions
  
• Lead code reviews, proof-of-concepts, and performance tuning for large-scale data systems
  
• Collaborate with data governance teams to ensure adherence to UHG and healthcare data standards, lineage, certification, Data use rights, and data privacy
  
• Contribute to the maturity of data governance domains and participate in governance councils and working groups
  
• Design, Build and monitor MLOps pipelines, model inference and robust piplelines for running AI operations on data
  
• Secondary Responsibilities
  
  • Mentor data engineers and analysts, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning
    
  • Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into data solutions
    
  • Influence architectural decisions across teams and contribute to enterprise-wide data strategy
    
  • Stay current with emerging technologies in cloud, big data, and AI/ML, and evaluate their applicability to healthcare data
    
  • Promote the use of generative AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to enhance development productivity and innovation
    
  • Drive adoption of DevOps and DataOps practices, including CI/CD, IaC, and automated testing for data pipelines
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• Cloud Platforms: Solid experience with Azure (preferred), AWS, or GCP
  
• Experience with designing and managing semantic data elements (metadata, configuration, master data). Come up with automated pipelines to keep them up-to-date from upstream sources 
• Good experience with designing, evolving and reviewing database schema. Experience with schema management for unstructured data, structured data, relational, star schema
• Data Modelling: Deep understanding of dimensional modeling, canonical models, and healthcare data standards (e.g., HL7, FHIR)
• DevOps/DataOps: Familiarity with CI/CD, IaC (Terraform, ARM)
  
• Data Engineering: Expertise in building ETL/ELT pipelines, data lakes, and real-time streaming architectures using python, scala or other comparable technologies
  
• Big Data Technologies: Proficient in Apache Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, and distributed data processing
  
• Programming: Proficiency in Python, SQL, and optionally Scala or Java
  
• Proven track record of designing and delivering large-scale data solutions in cloud environments
  
• Proven solid leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills
  
• Proven ability to mentor and influence across teams and levels
  
• Proven strategic thinker with a passion for data-driven innovation
• Proven ability to get into details whenever required and spend time in understanding and solving problems
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or related roles, with a focus on healthcare or clinical data
  
• Experience with healthcare data interoperability standards (FHIR, HL7, CCD)
  
• Familiarity with MLOps and integrating data pipelines with ML workflows
  
• Contributions to open-source projects or publications in data architecture or healthcare analytics

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone–of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income–deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes – an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.